And yet, few of these consumers were aware of Bradley's shortcut quietly lingering in their machines. It wasn't until the early 1990s, when Microsoft's Windows took off, that the shortcut came to prominence.

LordOfThePings:And yet, few of these consumers were aware of Bradley's shortcut quietly lingering in their machines. It wasn't until the early 1990s, when Microsoft's Windows took off, that the shortcut came to prominence.

Um, yeah, that's BS.

Yea, all the IBM (and other pc) instruction manuals had information on performing a "warm boot".

Story I was told by my dad (we had some of the first home PCs in the 80s, as my dad worked in aerospace and read the writing on the wall) was that the keys were selected purposefully so they wouldn't be pressed on accident. This was in the days before Windows asked you permission twice before doing anything, and one errant keystroke could format your entire computer, with no "are you sure" so you could go "wait wait I didn't mean THAT!"

*reads article*

Well waddya know.

/bonus fact: qwerty keyboards were also designed purposefully because typists were too fast for manual typewriters. Sucks that it's so stuck now we can't roll over to a more efficient lay out.

Unfortunately operating systems these days favor soft reset/shutdown. You have to negotiate with the system to convince it to turn off. Or you have to resort to the 5 second power button press and full power up slowness which the reset chord was meant to avoid.

I had a Mac application which popped up two dialog windows at the same time. You couldn't select either or dismiss either, and Macs refuse to shut down while a dialog is active.

I have given this passing thought before and I gotta say, that is *exactly* what I thought the origin of ctrl alt del would be.I'll even bet the guy was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, kept a moustache, and had on a pair of glasses with very sturdy frames at the precise moment he settled on the key sequence.

ZAZ:Unfortunately operating systems these days favor soft reset/shutdown. You have to negotiate with the system to convince it to turn off. Or you have to resort to the 5 second power button press and full power up slowness which the reset chord was meant to avoid.

I had a Mac application which popped up two dialog windows at the same time. You couldn't select either or dismiss either, and Macs refuse to shut down while a dialog is active.

Why is that unfortunate? A hard boot only adds a hardware test to the boot sequence. Do you really need to do that? I would think testing my memory should be a rare thing. If it's that important I'm going to use ECC and have it alert me for failures any way.

I Have servers i support that have 256gb ram and 80 cores. Takes 20+ minutes to boot if i let it do a full post. Needless to say downtime is hard to get and i want to minimize it any way i can. Including any hardware testing i can since i have Tivoli monitoring it any way.

Peki: ... bonus fact: qwerty keyboards were also designed purposefully because typists were too fast for manual typewriters. Sucks that it's so stuck now we can't roll over to a more efficient lay out.

Yep, otherwise adjacent typebars would get wedged together. Bonus bonus fact: all the letters in the word "TYPEWRITER" are on the top row, to make it easier for salespeople to demonstrate by typing said word.

When I worked for a large financial services company in the IT department, they were ultra paranoid about keeping workstations locked when you weren't at your desk. "CTRL ALT DELETE when you leave your seat" was posted all over the building.

endlessly recycled completely false urban legend: qwerty keyboards were also designed purposefully because typists were too fast for manual typewriters. Sucks that it's so stuck now we can't roll over to a more efficient lay out.

What's sadistic about Ctrl-Alt-Delete? I mean, yeah, there are some times when there's an unexpected error and you don't really want to quit fapping while you wait for the system to recover. It's not THAT bad, though.

Relatively Obscure:What's sadistic about Ctrl-Alt-Delete? I mean, yeah, there are some times when there's an unexpected error and you don't really want to quit fapping while you wait for the system to recover. It's not THAT bad, though.

Because you have to make the strenuous effort to use TWO hands to reboot the computer!!!~~

Peki:Story I was told by my dad (we had some of the first home PCs in the 80s, as my dad worked in aerospace and read the writing on the wall) was that the keys were selected purposefully so they wouldn't be pressed on accident. This was in the days before Windows asked you permission twice before doing anything, and one errant keystroke could format your entire computer, with no "are you sure" so you could go "wait wait I didn't mean THAT!"

*reads article*

Well waddya know.

/bonus fact: qwerty keyboards were also designed purposefully because typists were too fast for manual typewriters. Sucks that it's so stuck now we can't roll over to a more efficient lay out.

It was arrived at through a combination of design and trial-and-error, and the driving forces were to speed up (not slow down) typing and eliminate jams.

What's sadistic is that Microsoft co-opted the key combo from rebooting the PC (a last-ditch function that you don't want to do accidentally), to become a mandatory prerequisite for logging in to the PC (a common function that you always do on purpose) -- essentially the opposite of its original function. TFA doesn't explain why they did this.